N E -w . NOVEMBER, I929 IS Cents~ In This Issue UPTON SINCLAIR SCOTT NEARING I. KLEIN EM JO BASSHE WM. GROPPER K. A. PORTER MICHAEL GOLD ED FALKOWSKI LOUIS LOZOWICK JOSEPH KALAR JAN MATULKA THE STORY OF ELLA MAY By MARGARET LARKlN · NOVEMBER, 1929 15 Cents ~ In This Issue UPTON SINCLAIR SCOTT NEARING I. KLEIN EM JO BASSHE WM. GROPPER K.A.PORTER MICHAEL GOLD ED FALKOWSKI LOUIS LOZOWICK JOSEPH KALAR JAN MATULKA THE STORY OF ELLA MAY By MARGARET LARKIN GA.STONIA L. C. Carter testified: "There was a crash and right then a shot. A lot .f them in the truck began jumping out and them ,that called themselves tho law yelled:-'Halt them damn Russian Reds' anathey began shootin' at them." "Did ]/IOu run?" "No, they h'ain't apt to." "No, I don't come from a: sellin' out country." -At the inquest into the death of Ella May Wiggins, killed by mUi "FIolkSj where you come from don't run?" thugs in Gastonia-as reported by the N. Y. Telegram, Sept. 25, 1929. GASTONIA L. C. Carter testified: "There was a crash and right then a shot. A lot ef them in the truck began jumping out and them ,that called themselves the law yelled :-'Halt them damn Russian Reds' and- they began shootin' at them." "Did you run?" "No, they h'ain't apt to." uNo, I don't come from a sellin' out country!' -At the inquest into the death of Ella May Wiggins, killed by mill "FolkSj where you come from don't run?" thugs in Gastonia-as rep'orted by the N. Y. Telegram, Sept. 25, 1929. \ NOVEMBER, .9Z9 NEW MASSES VOLUME 5 NOVEMBER, 1929 NUMBER 6 MICHAEL GOLD, Editor ~.5? WALT CARMON, Managing Editor CONTRIBUTING EDI~ORS: Harbo~ Allen, Ejfmont Arens, Cornelia Barns, Em Jo Basshe, Carlton Beals, Van Wyck Brooks, Howard Brubaker, Stanley Burn· shaw, Stu.art C!Ia~e, ~1!Plel Covarrub.as, Adolph Dehn, ~obert Dunn, John Dos Pas.s'os, 'Wal~a Fran~, Jos~h Fre\'ffian, Wanda Gag, Hugo Gellert, Arturo GlOvanmttt, Wilham Gropper, Charles Yale Harnson, Joseph Kalar, Freda Klrchwey, Gan Kolski, LOUIS Lozowlck, I. Klein John Howard Lawson, H .. ~. Le~is, Norman l\~acle,?d, Claude McI<;ay, Lewis Mumford, Scott Nearing, Samuel Orn!tz, J;.ola Ridge, Boardman Robinson, Jame~ Rorty, Martin Russak, Wilham Siegel, Upton Smcla.r, Bernard Smith, Otto Soglow, Herman Spector, Rex Stout, GeneVieve Taggard, Mary Heaton Vorse, Keene Wallis Eric Walrond, Edmund Wilson, Jr., Robert Wolf, Art Young. ' Published monthly by NEW MASSES, Inc., ~ffice 0.1 publicatio.n .112 E. 19 St., New York. Copyright, 1929, by NEW MASSES, Inc., Reg. U. S. Patent Offic'e. Drawmgs and text may not be reprmted without perm.SSlOn. Entered as second class matter, June 24, 1926, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., under the act of March 3, 1879. Subscribers are notified that no change 01 address can be effected in less th an a month. The NEW MASSES is a co-operative venture. It does not pay for contributions. SUbscription $1.50 a year in U. S. and Colonres and Mexico. Foreign $2.00. Canada, $2.50. Single Copies, 15 cents. THE STORY OF ELLA MAY By MARGARET LARKIN The Mays were hill folks. They farmed a little patch of rocky mill, Ella May was one of the first to join. Then there opened for ground far up in the Great Smoky Mountains. They had yams, her six months of intense, eager living. Like many another mill cabbages, and beans, some apple trees, and a corn patch, and in worker whose life has been cast in a drab, uneventful pattern by the Fall they killed and cured "hawg" meat and hunted rabbits the mill, she gloried in the vivid strike. Meetings, speeches, and 'possums. But they never had enough money for clothes, picket lines, and that strange mass power we call solidarity, de­ and the family was large. So when Ella May was ten they came veloped the latent talents of the spinner from the mountains. She down to the logging camps. learned to speak; she worked on committees; she helped give out Old man May worked first in one camp, then in another, around relief; she organized for the defense of imprisoned strikers. She Andrews, North Carolina. Whenever the camp was changed, the was proud that she could keep neat and accurate account books. company would move the rickety shanty they lived in on a flat car. She would tell in union speeches of her struggle in the mill vil­ Mis' May and Ella, her second oldest girl, took in washing for lages. "I never made no more than nine dollars a week, and you the bachelor loggers. They heated water over a brush fire in can't do for a family on such money," she would say. "I'm the the big iron soap kettle, and washed out of doors. mother of nine. Four died with the whooping cough. I was Schools in the logging camps were casual affairs, but somehow working nights, and I asked the super to put me on days, so's Ella May learned to read and figure, and to write a neat hand. I could tend 'em when they had their bad spells. But he wouldn't. She was popular in camp, for she was a "purty young 'un". She He's the sorriest man alive, I reckon. So I had to quit, and then had a fine, ringing voice, and nobody else could sing "Little Mary there wasn't no money for medicine, and they just died. I couldn't Fagan," "Lord Lovel" and "Sweet William" with such plaintive do for my children any more than you women on the money we git. sweetness as she. "All she needed to a-ben a doll was to have That's why I come out for the union, and why we all got ·to stand the breath squeezed outen her" said a man who remembered her for the union, so's we can do better for our children, and they brief girlhood, when she lay dead at twenty-nine. won't have lives like we got." When Ella May was sixteen she married John Wiggins. Myrtle The immense vitality of the mountain woman, that ten years was their first baby. Just before their second child was born, in the mills had not quenched, overflowed into songs about the John Wiggins slipped and was crushed by a log. He didn't die, union and the strike,-"Song Ballets," she called them. On the but he was crippled for life. backs of union leaflets she wrote new words to the ballads she had sung as a girl. In her deep tones she sang them out of doors There is no work for a crippled man in a lumber camp, and at the strike meetings. The strikers loved to hear "Chief Ader­ there was no way for Ella Wiggins to earn a living there, either. holt," "Come and Join the LL.D." and "The Mill Mother's Song." When a mill agent came through, gathering up whole families to Like all true poets she wrote of the things she knew and had work in the new cotton mills of North Carolina, Ella May and suffered. When Ella May sang, her babies went back with him. They taught her to spin, and for ten years she spun yarn in "How it grieves the heart of a mother the mills. She never made more than nine dollars a week. Every You everyone must know, year she carried another child, until there were nine to feed on But we can't buy for our children, a spinner's wages. Our wages are too low" . John Wiggins helped out at first, but there are few odd jobs around a mill town, and besides, each mill makes cripples of its every woman in her audience did know, and responded to the own. He had been a steady fellow in the mountains,-a logger, common feeling. When she sang "We're going to have a union and the husband of the prettiest girl in canlp. In town he idled all over the South," the strike meetings thrilled to the ring of and drank, till Ella May wished she was shut of him. At last militancy in her voice. he deserted her. Ella May was martyred on September 14, when she tried to Ella May proudly took back her own name. While Myrtle attend a union meeting in Gastonia. A truck load of workers looked after the younger children, she worked in American Spin­ from Bessemer City was turned back and wrecked by a mob that ning Number One, in Bessemer City. had roamed the highways all day to prevent anyone from reach­ When the National Textile Workers' Union called a strike in her ing the meeting. As the trllck W!ltl'l wrecked shots were fired NEW MASSES Down South: "The hell it ain't legal" I says, "why we got the county prosecutor doin' the flog gin' /" Dmwn by Walter Steinhilber into the crowd of helpless workers. "Oh Lordy, I'm killed," cried The Baptist minister was there. He hadn't known Ella May. He Ella May, and fell dead. didn't know anything about her union. He didn't mention how Perhaps it was chance that the bullet hit Ella May, but not one she had met her death in that wild pursuit of the union truck by of her fellow workers believes it. "The bosses hated Ella May the Black Hundreds of the Loray mill.